Presentation to eScience Steering Committee

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Presentation to e-Science Steering Committee

• Chris Rusbridge, Digital Curation Centre

Funded by
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Contents

• Aims and mission
• Structures
• Issues
• Feedback?

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Digital Curation Centre

• History
• JISC Strategy (Beagrie et al)
• Lord and MacDonald report
• JISC and e-Science funding
• Call for bids 2003
• DCC Project for 3 years
• Service began March 2004
• Research began September 2004
• Twin drivers
• eScience - data deluge - continuing access
• Digital Preservation

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Digital curation
For later use
In use now (and the future)
Static
Dynamic
Digital preservation
Digital curation
maintaining and adding value to a trusted body
of digital information for current and future
use
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Mission

• support and promote continuing improvement in the
  quality of digital curation and preservation

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Aims

• Promote understanding of the need for digital
  curation amongst disciplines
• Share knowledge of digital curation between
  disciplines
• Provide services to facilitate digital curation
• Develop technology to support digital curation
• Conduct long term research on digital curation

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Objectives

• Vibrant research programme
• addressing the wider issues of digital curation
• Associates Network
• strong links across existing community of
  practice
• engagement with curators (individuals
  organisations)
• Services
• evaluate tools, methods, standards and policies
• a repository of tools and technical information
• provide advice
• Virtuous circle
• expertise, experience requirement feed into the
  DCC research programme back to development
  service

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DCC Consortium Partners

• Four Consortium partner institutions
• University of Edinburgh (lead, EDINA/NeSC/Informat
  ics)
• University of Glasgow (HATII)
• UKOLN, at University of Bath
• CCLRC (Rutherford and Daresbury Laboratories)

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Organisation
curation organisations eg DPC
communities of practice users
community support outreach
service definition delivery
Associates Network
management admin support
research collaborators
research
development co-ordination
testbeds tools
Industry
standards bodies
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Organisation
curation organisations eg DPC
communities of practice users
UKOLN
Associates Network
U of Edinburgh
U of Edinburgh
U of Glasgow
research collaborators
CCLRC
testbeds tools
Industry
standards bodies
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Staffing

• New Director and Administrator
• Almost all other staffing in place
• Remaining post-docs being recruited

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Research agenda

• Leading towards development
• Data integration
• XML publishing, update and security
• Data annotation
• Provenance
• Metadata extraction
• Socio-economic and legal issues

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Socio-economic and legal contexts

• Networks of trusted repositories
• Varying preservation role for repositories
• Roles for co-operation, exchange formats,
  replication, etc.
• Economic cost-benefit analysis of curation
  processes
• Quantifying costs and benefits
• Testing economic viability of curation processes
• Rights and responsibilities
• The legal contexts of curation, e.g. impacts of
  the Database Directive
• Complexity of rights held in databases, impacts
  on aggregation and reuse of data

Michael Day
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Development activity

• OAIS-based (ISO standard for preservation of
  information)
• Representation Information
• Registry/Repository
• Working with PRONOM, GDFR, APSR
• Preservation Description Information and toolsets
• EAST description of science datasets

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Development activity

• Testbeds
• Includes SRB
• Add preservation capabilities
• CCLRC datasets first, then broader
• Expert RLG panel on certification and audit
• EU panel of experts on digital preservation

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Services and Outreach

• Advisory Service Help Desk
• Leading to FAQs
• Digital Curation Manual
• Briefing papers case studies
• Development of audit certification
• Tools repository
• Technology standards watch
• Workshop series
• Associates Network and Forum
• International Journal of Digital Curation

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Workshops

• Persistent identifiers
• Long term curation in repositories
• Cost models
• Long term curation in medical databases
• Site visits

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• www.ijdc.net
• Launch planned July
• Peer-reviewed contributions
• Peter Buneman Editor (research)
• Production editor Philip Hunter

Liz Lyon
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1st DCC International Conference

• Location - Bath UK
• 29-30 September 2005
• Keynote speakers
• Clifford Lynch CNI
• Graham Cameron European Bio-informatics
  Institute
• DCC Research update
• Social highlights

Liz Lyon
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Associates Network
Goals Develop understanding, share best practice,
advance research, promote recognition, develop
consensus Membership International groups,
national bodies, industry partners, funders,
research groups, HEIs, FEIs, individuals Benefit
s Early access to RD outputs, advisory services,
training, input to definition and design,
community participation Discussion Forum
www.dcc.ac.uk Please join us!
Liz Lyon
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Community contacts

• Astronomy and Space
• Biological
• Chemistry
• Environment
• Linguistics
• Medical
• Particle physics
• Social sciences

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Particle physics anecdote

• Post hoc access to data from very low to very
  high energy levels

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Astronomy example
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More like data
Images from Nigel Hambly, Edinburgh WFAU
one of the coolest and therefore oldest white
dwarfs ever found,,, a member of a hitherto
unobserved and possibly large population of faint
stars
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Example

• National Virtual Observatory
• Johns Hopkins press release Scientists working
  to create the NVO, an online portal for
  astronomical research unifying dozens of large
  astronomical databases, confirmed discovery of
  a new brown dwarf recently. The star emerged
  from a computerized search of information on
  millions of astronomical objects in two separate
  astronomical databases. Thanks to an NVO
  prototype, that search, formerly an endeavor
  requiring weeks or months of human attention,
  took approximately two minutes.

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TWOMASS (Infrared)
SDSS (Visual)
Slide from Rajendra Bose
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Slide from Rajendra Bose
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AstroDAS annotations
SDSS_objid
annote1
TWOMASS_objid
annote2
annote_source
SAME OBJECT
(evidence1)
112233
445566
GROUP1
NOT SAME OBJECT
(evidence2)
112233
445566
GROUP2
NOT SAME OBJECT
(evidence3)
112233
778899
GROUP1





Slide from Rajendra Bose
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Publication with data Internet Archaeology
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Nature article 23 June 05

• Databases in Peril
• 51 out of 89 biological databases contacted
  reported they were struggling financially
• 7 have closed
• Several being updated in owners spare time
• Notes that not all deserve long term support!

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Repository issues

• US National Science Board
• Long-lived Digital Data Collections enabling
  Research and Education in the 21st Century draft
  agreed subject to editorial changes
• Digital data collections at heart of
  fundamentally new approaches to research and
  education
• Analysis of un-precedented sophistication
• Novel insights
• New phenomena for study (themselves)
• Powerful force for inclusion, removing barriers
• NSF policies and funding developed incrementally
  and not considered collectively

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NSB report

• Recommends
• Clear technical and financial strategy (cf
  previous incrementalism)
• Agency-wide umbrella strategy
• Clarify community-proxy obligations
• Require data management plans
• Educate in use of digital collections
• Develop career for data scientists

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Questions for us

• Is the UK/EU situation more coherent and better
  founded?
• Relevance for e-Infrastructure Roadmap?
• Relevance for RCUK Position Statement on Open
  Access to Research Outputs?
• Relationship to RCUK working group on data
  curation?

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Digital Preservation Coalition relationship?

• DCC a full member, on behalf of e-Science core
  programme
• DPC more strongly concerned with
• Preservation
• Publicity, PR and awareness raising
• DCC research, development and service-oriented
• Relationship needs more clarity

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• We would welcome your feedback!
• Chris Rusbridge
• c.rusbridge_at_ed.ac.uk
• www.dcc.ac.uk